Robots are the great bogeymen of the 21st century. With their superhuman strength and non-stop work ethic many feel they are gunning for our jobs. But these fears may be overblown. The first comprehensive look at automation on the German economy suggests that robots created more jobs than they destroyed.
People鈥檚 fears have been stoked by headlines warning of the robot take over. A 2013 Oxford University study, for example, suggests robots are poised to replace as much as 47 per cent of the US workforce and 35 per cent of the UK鈥檚.
Far from this apocalyptic scenario, automation resulted in an in Germany between 2011 and 2016. While robots claimed 5 per cent of jobs, more new ones were created. What鈥檚 more, most of these tended to pay better than those that had been lost.
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An industrial robot may replace a hundred workers, but there are knock-on effects that can add jobs elsewhere. 鈥淣ow the company can produce the same good, but more cheaply. Demand goes up and they need to hire more people to fill the new demand,鈥� says Melanie Arntz at the Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany. Previous studies also overestimated the relationship between jobs that can be automated and those that will, says Arntz.
To come to this conclusion, Arntz and her colleagues surveyed 2000聽senior managers at companies representing a broad swathe of the German economy. The team asked the managers to rate the level of automation at their companies in each year between 2011 and 2016. This was then cross-referenced with data from the German Federal Employment Agency on around 300,000 workers to build up the overall picture.
The basic mechanics of robot job creation should transfer from Germany to other countries like the UK and US, says Arntz. But though things are looking up for German workers overall, it鈥檚 not clear that all of the findings will apply elsewhere. For example, German declines in manufacturing employment are similar to those in the US, but Germany somehow avoided the non-manufacturing declines.
鈥淚 would have liked them to dig deeper into understanding what the source of the difference is,鈥� says Acemo臒lu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Acemo臒lu suggest that Germany鈥檚 social safety net may be responsible for taking the sting out of automation by allowing unemployed people to continue using local businesses, which would otherwise decline in the absence of customers.
Read more: Robots won鈥檛 take as many of our jobs as feared, says report
